The Top Ten Excuses Sarah Palin Could Use to Back Out of the Race

We all know Sarah Palin is going to beat all expectations in the vice-presidential debate tomorrow night, because when you are trying to clear a bar that’s already on the ground, it’s really hard to not jump high enough. But still, many (including staunch conservatives) are beginning to discuss the possibility of eliminating her from the McCain ticket. Though it has long been argued that this would be political suicide, McCain strategist Steve Schmidt has already proven that he’s able to take the sourest lemons and make them into fabulous, audacious lemonade. He’s actually a short-term polling genius, and depending on timing, a stunt like dropping Palin could give the McCain camp another giant boost. We know you think we’re crazy, but let us give you some potential scenarios in which a Palin departure could be turned by the McCain campaign into a plus. Behold, a top-tenlist!

How Sarah Palin Could Safely Drop Out of theRace:

10. She could say her daughters made her do it. There’s been so much concern over whether Palin could be vice-president and a good mother at the same time, so people might just swallow this. She asked her daughters Willow, Bristol and Piper whether she should accept John McCain’s offer. According to her, they voted unanimously that she should. If they voted her in, they could impeach her too, right?

9. She could fall on her own sword and claim that 5-month-old Trig is her daughter Bristol’s baby. Let’s be clear — this wild Internet theory has been discarded by the Times and other reputable sources. But feigning its truth would thrill liberal bloggers, who might give McCain a pass in their glee over being correct on a widely held, secretly fervent belief. It would be the ultimate contrarian surrender — and Andrew Sullivan would basically die. Also, back in Alaska, she might just get another pass for trying to protect her daughter. If she used to be starring in a Disney movie, she’d now be starring in a Lifetimemovie!

8. She could fake a health condition. If elected, she would famously be “a heartbeat away from the presidency.” She also famously installed a tanning bed in the governor’s mansion. Who says she can’t be a melanoma away fromnormalcy?

7. God could tell her it’s not her time. Seriously, who is she to argue with God? And who are you? (No, seriously, who are you — do we need to get a witch doctor inhere?)

6. She could claim that she’s pregnant and can’t maintain the vigorous campaign schedule. Stranger things have happened.Seriously.

5. She could blame media sexism. If Palin argued that, due to recent media sexism, McCain can’t win with her on the ticket, voters and journalists would go wild. Sure, it would be dubious, but already pundits are struggling to define her as incompetent without seeming anti-feminist. And people who buy into such stunts (Hillary holdouts, we’re looking at you) might even start a movement to get her back on the ticket. Let’s be honest, with collars like those, she needs to be in charge of some kind ofmovement.

4. She could claim Alaska needs her. The state is being rocked by a series of corruption scandals. And what if Putin rears his head? We all know Russia’s not going to watchitself!

3. Better yet, Bush could appoint her ambassador to Russia. Sure, current ambassador John Beyrle only began his job in July, but who even knows who that is? Bush could surely take one for the team and replace him with Palin. Beyrle doesn’t even have any executive experience, and he grew up in Michigan, where you can’t even seeRussia!

2. She could decide McCain isn’t conservative enough for her. Sarah Palin is so hard right that to her, neither evolution nor the morning-after pill even exist. It would be completely legitimate for her to explain that, after studying up on the positions of McCain, he is not conservative enough to her tastes, and she would not want to be a part of his administration. Sure, this would rattle the base, who flocked to McCain after her appointment, but it would give him an opportunity to endlessly rattle off his conservative credentials again. And it would reassure independents that he truly is a maverick, and allies with no strict ideology. You can just imagine the key moment, during which McCain asks her to sign a statement with him opposing ANWR drilling. Palin shouts, “That’s a negative, Ghost Rider, those oil fields are full,” and then moments later he issues the statement anyway, forcing her to yelp and spill coffee onherself.

1. After failing so dismally at so much forced studying for the debates, she could “learn” that she has a learning disability. She clearly doesn’t, but who’s going to argue with someone who claims that about herself? She’s already a hero to families with special-needs children — this could be her full-time gig. She’s the governor of Alaska with a mental handicap — it’s the American dream, personified! This is no longer a Disney movie or a Lifetime movie. It’s an HBOmini-series!

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THE FEED

7:17 a.m.

Don’t understand how one twin could be a U.S. citizen from birth, while the other isn’t? A federal judge didn’t get it either

A federal judge in California ruled Thursday that a twin son of a gay married couple has been an American citizen since birth, handing a defeat to the U.S. government, which had only granted the status to his brother.

The State Department was wrong to deny citizenship to 2-year-old Ethan Dvash-Banks, District Judge John F. Walter found. The lawsuit filed by the boys’ parents, Andrew and Elad Dvash-Banks, sought the same rights for Ethan that his brother, Aiden, has as a citizen.

Each boy was conceived with donor eggs and the sperm from a different father — one an American, the other an Israeli citizen — but born by the same surrogate mother minutes apart.

The government had only granted citizenship to Aiden, who DNA tests showed was the biological son of Andrew, a U.S. citizen. Ethan was conceived from the sperm of Elad Dvash-Banks, an Israeli citizen.

Christopher Hasson, the alleged white supremacist who was plotting to kill journalists and Democratic politicians, was probably caught because he did his research on a work computer

The U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant spent hours on end planning a wide-scale domestic terrorist attack, even logging in at his work computer on the job at headquarters to study the manifestos and heinous paths of mass shooters, prosecutors say. He researched how to carry out sniper attacks, they contend, and whether rifle scopes were illegal. And all the while, investigators assert, he was amassing a cache of weapons as he ruminated about attacks on politicians and journalists.

… It was only after Hasson’s arrest last Friday at his workplace that the chilling plans prosecutors assert he was crafting became apparent, detected by an internal Coast Guard program that watches for any “insider threat.”

The program identified suspicious computer activity tied to Hasson, prompting the agency’s investigative service to launch an investigation last fall, said Lt. Cmdr. Scott McBride, a service spokesman.

Signs that we’re nearing the end of single-stream recycling as we know it

The conscientious citizens of Philadelphia continue to put their pizza boxes, plastic bottles, yoghurt containers and other items into recycling bins.

But in the past three months, half of these recyclableshave been loaded on to trucks, taken to a hulking incineration facility and burned, according to the city’s government.

It’s a situation being replicated across the US as cities struggle to adapt to a recent ban by China on the import of items intended for reuse.

Until recently, China had been taking about 40% of US paper, plastics and other recyclables but this trans-Pacific waste route has now ground to a halt. In July 2017, China told the World Trade Organization it no longer wanted to be the end point for yang laji, or foreign garbage, with the country keen to grapple with its own mountains of waste.

A former member of Fox News’ “Medical A-Team” was reportedly sued by three female patients within the past year claiming he lured them into sexual relationships that degraded the women through beatings and bondage. One woman even got a tattoo featuring the doctor’s initials so that he could claim “ownership” of her.

One Ohio woman described how she received Ketamine shots from visited Ablow in 2015 to treat her depression and started having Skype sessions with him. Ablow reportedly began to ask the woman personal questions, then started asking her about her sexual preferences—specifically if she liked to be dominant or submissive.

Another former patient of Ablow’s, from New York, got a tattoo of Ablow’s initials upon his request and endured allegedly abusive behavior.

How Biden’s potential absence in 2020 could skew the chances of other contenders.

Cameron Easley, Washington editor, Morning Consult

Sanders, Harris, and Warren could be key beneficiaries of Biden’s existing support … Sanders would be the biggest beneficiary if Biden decides not to run. Twenty-four percent of the likely Democratic primary voters who said the former vice president was their first choice picked the Vermont senator as their runner-up, compared with 11 percent who opted for Kamala Harris as second choice and 10 percent who chose Elizabeth Warren.

Tim Malloy, assistant director, Quinnipiac University Poll

Take him out of the equation and Sen. Kamala Harris would appear to be the frontrunner with a virtual army of would-be Democrats, from the far left to the more moderate, assembling campaign teams and looking for an opening.

Kyle Kondik, managing editor, Sabato’s Crystal Ball

My guess is that Biden’s support would not immediately go to one person disproportionately. Maybe Bernie Sanders would benefit only because he has the most name ID (along with Biden) of the candidates. But I don’t know if that would actually make Sanders a likelier nominee; these early polls can be just a measure of name ID.

In the early going, Kamala Harris has seemed to make the biggest splash of the candidates who are not otherwise well-known nationally. That said, I do not believe there is a true frontrunner in this race as of yet.

China has been using DNA technology provided by a Massachusetts company to crack down on Uighur Muslims

China wants to make the country’s Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, more subservient to the Communist Party. It has detained up to a million people in what China calls “re-education” camps, drawing condemnation from human rights groups and a threat of sanctions from the Trump administration.

Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign, according to human rights groups and Uighur activists. They say a comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.

To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by Kenneth Kidd, a prominent Yale University geneticist.

On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would no longer sell its equipment in Xinjiang, the part of China where the campaign to track Uighurs is mostly taking place. The company said separately in an earlier statement to The New York Times that it was working with American officials to figure out how its technology was being used.

John C. Fry has been charged in federal court with searching for and disseminating Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), reports filed by banks when they note potentially suspicious transactions.

Federal officials say they found telephone records that indicate Fry placed a phone call from his personal cell phone to that of Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti the day before Avenatti released details of Cohen’s financial transactions, and the day after.

According to the complaint, he conducted numerous searches related to Cohen, and downloaded five SARs, including one related to a bank account for Essential Consultants.

Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee, pictured right, apologizes for picture in an Auburn yearbook in which he is dressed as a Confederate solider: “With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that participating in that was insensitive and I’ve come to regret it.”

Photo: Auburn University Glomerata

2/21/2019

California’s public pension fund is a major investor in the National Enquirer, owning as much as a third of its parent company American Media Inc.

The National Enquirer has been one of President Trump’s most controversial allies, delivering scathing coverage of his opponents to super market check-out lines and funneling $150,000 to one of his alleged mistresses to buy her silence.

So it will probably come as a surprise to California state employees and taxpayers to learn they were helping fund those efforts.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, California’s massive public pension fund, CalPERS, was one of the biggest investors in the debt-laden owner of the National Enquirer, according to public records reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

The big dollar targets for Democrats just so happen to include the four major states that went to Obama in 2012 and to Trump in 2016

.@prioritiesUSA, the largest Dem super PAC, is launching an early $100M presidential effort in FL, WI, MI, and PA, @guycecil tells reporters in DC this AM. Phase two, before the end of this year, will expand into NV, NH, AZ, NC, and GA.

One of the more voracious readers in recent presidential history, Obama will not have a traditional presidential library

The four-building, 19-acre “working center for citizenship,” set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill.

In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records. Instead, the Obama Foundation will pay to digitize the roughly 30 million pages of unclassified paper records from the administration so they can be made available online.

And the entire complex, including the museum chronicling Mr. Obama’s presidency, will be run by the foundation, a private nonprofit entity, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers the libraries and museums for all presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.

Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said Thursday he expects to make a springtime trip to New Hampshire as he weighs a 2020 challenge to Donald Trump — and accused the Republican National Committee of going to extraordinary lengths to shield the president from a potentially draining primary.

“Typically they try to be fair arbiters of a process and I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been involved in the Republican Party for most of my life. It’s unprecedented. And in my opinion it’s not the way we should be going about our politics,” Hogan, a popular two-term Maryland governor, said in an interview with POLITICO. “It’s very undemocratic and to say, ‘We’re in some cases not going to allow a debate, we may not have a primary…’”

The 62-year-old Hogan, who won reelection in liberal Maryland last year, has openly flirted with a primary challenge in recent weeks. The governor used his January inauguration speech to implicitly go after the president and to raise the specter of impeachment. He later met with conservative columnist and prominent Trump critic Bill Kristol, who has been seeking out a 2020 Republican primary challenger.

More chilling details about the white nationalist Coast Guard lieutenant who appeared to be planning a killing spree

At his detention hearing, prosecutors said that Hasson spent $14,000 a year on arms and equipment to prepare for an attack and that he read manifestos of several mass attackers, including the Unabomber and the Virginia Tech shooter.

Hasson called for “focused violence” to “establish a white homeland,” prosecutors said in court filings. It’s unclear whether Hasson had a specific date for an attack, but the government said he had been stockpiling weapons for at least two years.

During the raid this month, law enforcement officers seized 15 firearms and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition from his residence in the suburbs just north of Washington.

As recently as Jan. 17, Hasson created a list of “traitors” and targets in a spreadsheet while reviewing various broadcast news sites from his work computer, court filings show. The list included people prosecutors believe to be Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), CNN reporter Don Lemon and nearly two dozen others.

Official condemnation for the sordid role Alexander Acosta played in the Jeffrey Epstein child-sex case

A judge ruled Thursday that federal prosecutors — among them, U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta — broke federal law when they signed a plea agreement with a wealthy, politically connected sex trafficker and concealed it from more than 30 of his underage victims.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra, in a 33-page opinion, said that the evidence he reviewed showed that Jeffrey Epstein had been operating an international sex operation in which he and others recruited underage girls — not only in Florida — but from overseas, in violation of federal law.

“Epstein used paid employees to find and bring minor girls to him.,’’ wrote Marra, who is based in Palm Beach County. “Epstein worked in concert with others to obtain minors not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others.’’

Instead of prosecuting Epstein under federal sex trafficking laws, Acosta, then the U.S. attorney in Miami, helped negotiate a non-prosecution agreement that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution. Epstein, who lived in a Palm Beach mansion, was allowed to quietly plead guilty in state court to two prostitution charges and served just 13 months in the county jail. His accomplices, some of whom have never been identified, were never charged.

As you wrote today, the Democratic primary calendar looks a little different this year. California, that population behemoth, is moving up its vote to early March. And there’s the rise of early voting in important early contests like South Carolina, which comes just after Iowa and New Hampshire on the calendar, but which is far more diverse than those states. Taken together, these developments give considerably more power to voters of color, who are the bedrock of the Democratic base. What is the most obvious repercussion for 2020 candidates?

Ed Kilgore3:34 PM

It means that anyone who wants to win needs to show some appeal to minority voters much earlier than in the past. You’re not going to put away the field by winning Iowa and New Hampshire and then figuring out how to connect with nonwhite voters later.

In that respect, the size of the 2020 field intensifies this effect. The saying used to be that there are “three tickets out of Iowa.” It’s extremely unlikely the field will be winnowed that much that quickly.

Benjamin Hart3:37 PM

So there’s now a better possibility for this to be a drawn-out slog?

Ed Kilgore3:38 PM

Yes, though again, the process is most likely to be prolonged by a combination of the insanely large field and Democrats’ strictly proportional delegate award system.

The sudden emergence of states with large minority populations early on the calendar could cut in different directions.It’s certainly tailor-made for a candidate like Kamala Harris, if she can do just well enough in Iowa and New Hampshire to get some positive attention, and can then decisively outflank the other two minority candidates (Booker and Castro).

Benjamin Hart3:41 PM

Bernie Sanders is probably the A-level candidate who is most identified with an inability to connect very well with black voters. What do you think this means for him?

Ed Kilgore3:42 PM

It’s not ideal for him, given the strong start he got in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2016. There was some evidence late in the 2016 primaries that Sanders was doing better among minority voters, particularly younger ones, so maybe he can build on that. He will have to fight to do as well as actual minority candidates or someone like Biden with well-established appeal.

Benjamin Hart3:44 PM

This shift away from white-voter primacy has been long sought by many in the Democratic party. do you think the new tweaks address what had been a pretty major problem in a fair and thoughtful way?

Ed Kilgore3:45 PM

Don’t know that a series of coinciding accidents can be described as “thoughtful,” but yeah, I do think it’s fairer. My friends in Iowa probably won’t agree.

Benjamin Hart3:45 PM

So this wasn’t really a coordinated change at all?

Ed Kilgore3:46 PM

No. What’s really changed is the emergence of early voting, which was engineered more by state legislatures than by the national party.

To be clear, the earlier advancement of Nevada and South Carolina (which happened prior to 2008) was a deliberate effort by the national party to make the group of protected early states more diverse. So in some respects this year’s developments just represent major moves in the same direction.

Benjamin Hart3:49 PM

Lastly: will Iowa and New Hampshire ever be knocked out of their exalted first-in-the-nation spots? I mean, it doesn’t really make sense that they’re deciding much of anything, does it?

Ed Kilgore3:50 PM

I would compare this to the whole kind of silly “open primaries” debate, which has been made largely moot by the advent of rules allowing voters to change their party registration on Election Day.

I think the war on the Iowa/New Hampshire duopoly may become moot if their stranglehold on the nomination process is relaxed. So maybe my friends in Iowa should relax and accept a diminished but still important role in the process.

Roger Stone goes with the “I’m an idiot” defense in trying to explain an Instagram post that juxtaposed the judge overseeing his case with what appeared to be crosshairs

Roger Stone on the stand now: “I believe I abused the order for which I am sorry. I am kicking myself over my own stupidity. I offer no excuse for it, no justification. It was the outgrowth of a lapse in judgement.”